by Sassy Jones

Created on: July 31, 2009

Comparing movies to the books they were adapted from may be a little unfair since the mediums are so different, and yet the comparison is inevitable because of the similarity of the story. There are some movies that drifted too far from the original text that the book's author refused to allow the movie to use the name of the novel or the author's name. One famous example of this is the adaption of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving was aghast at the changes the movie makers made, and so disavowed the movie and disallowed the novel's title or any character names to be used. The movie version is called Simon Birch, and in reading the book and watching the movie, you can understand why Irving felt the movie cannibalized his novel. The makers of the Harry Potter movies have gone to the other extreme, though, of sticking too closely to the story of the novels, which stifled the storytelling in the movie.

The magic of books and the magic of movies are completely different. All you have to do is read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and then watch the movie, or vice versa, and the difference is obvious. The book is alive with with wonder and description. The kids each have their own voice and are fully realized. The story dances in your head letting you share in the wonder that Harry feels as he experiences a new world. The movie doesn't have that same sense of wonder. Instead of letting the viewer discover with Harry a world where finally fits, the movie never allows the audience to connect with and thus enter Harry's world. There is a detachment to the storytelling. The movie makers didn't transform the novel into a movie, they just transliterated it to a screen.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkeban was the first movie that took the themes and story of the book and re-imagined it into a movie It is the best film of the first three by far. Instead of just clipping out a few subplots or scenes that help to make the movie comprehensible to those who have not read the books, they took the elements of the story apart and put them back together in a new way that made sense cinematically. So, instead of having the whole middle portion of the movie bogged down in whether Harry would get to use the Firebolt that he was mysteriously sent, he was presented with it at the end and he takes off into the sky on it. In the novel, the anxiety and the tension that the gift of the broomstick caused and Harry's desire for it fueled the plot and helped to develop Harry's character as well as the relationship between him, Ron, and Hermione. The movie still showed that development, but in a different way. Each movie since then has had to hone the story down to its essential parts because the novels are dense with characters, subplots, and descriptions that either do not translate well into a film or are too vast to be included.

Film and novels are two completely different modes of entertainment. The same story can be told in each format but must be adapted into the new realm, not just literally transferred over. While the early Harry Potter movies were too literal to their source materials, the later films have transformed into works in their own right.

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